I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, author and professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. I co-direct the Center for Digital Narrative, a 10-year Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence, and I lead the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life. This site started as my blog in October 2000.
HÂkon Styri
Hastily translated, the main points are as follows.
According to a Perseus survey, 26% of blogs that weren’t updated in the last two months were abandoned the same day they were started.
Why do people quit blogging after a short time? One reason is quite well known to traditional authors as well. It’s quite hard to write without an audience. Writing for a blog that gets no traffic may be the reason some people quit.
The next reason I suspect may be a reason for quitting is lack of purpose, or no defined project for a blog. Many bloggers are of course joyfully writing about everything and anything in their blogs, but a blog with no purpose is likely to be at risk.
If purpose is the strategy of a blogger, ideas would be the stuff behind each post in the blog. If a blogger gets no ideas that she considers worthy of blogging, I guess she’s in the state commonly known as writers block.
Anyway, these are just my thoughts about why so many blogs are abandoned after a short time. I’m happy for comments, and it would be nice if someone did some research. (I believe Jill may know about students of blogology.)
HÂkon Styri
Ouch, I forgot one obvious reason. There are a few blogging projects that have a short time span by definition. A holiday or travel blog, or a blog started for the purpose of completing a blogging class at some uni.
It’s the project/purpose problem, but it’s not lack of purpose. It’s just that the project is short lived.
Erik
That makes perfect sense. I have just started a blog, and have one entry so far. It is a purpose problem. What goes on it, what is worth going on it, what would people want to know? I am about to overcome that, though, and just see what develops.
Eirik
Joho’s old motto – “Let’s just see how it goes” – sums it up quite neatly in my opinion. Anyhoo, as HÂkon point out the problems are by no means unique to blogging. As a writer of paper-based books and articles I have very limited knowledge of my readership. Sales numbers don’t really tell me how many people actually finish a book, neither does library lending statistics, BTW. And as for the lack of purpose or direction when writing a book – well, tell me about it! 😉